Multiplayer (29 page)

“In case we get attacked, there’ll be half as many bullets coming at me.” Which he didn’t mean. He’d stand in front of her and die without an instant’s hesitation in either universe.

“I love you, too,” Veyron replied glibly, and they crawled out into the empty courtyard.

“We need to head over to the resort,” Izaak said, pointing beyond the wall where they could see the dome of the mosque beside it. “The night Rada got killed, it didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but I saw a bunch of diagrams and lists on the wall of al-Nib’s room.”

“Lists?”

“Names. And maybe a diagram of the plan.”

Veyron sounded doubtful. “Wouldn’t that be a little foolish to keep that sort of thing just laying around in the open?”

“That’s the beauty of how they’re doing this,” Izaak replied. “Terrorists have to keep lists. And plans. They have to be organized or it’s just a couple of guys running around with guns. My dad told me the best way to break up their networks was to raid a cell, get their laptops, follow the leads. These guys have lists, too, but if someone got their computers, all they get is a copy of
Omega Wars
. They’d have to search the whole world in OW to find their lists – and that’s if they knew they were here.”

“Wow.” Sabrah set her controller down. He saw in her eyes she was finally beginning to understand. “I hadn’t thought about that. So, what would you do with it if you got it? It’s just names.”

“It might be more. And what’s the FBI going to think when some suburban kid gives them a list of terrorist names? That sort of stuff is like, top secret.”

Izaak led her up on the wall, where they crouched low and scurried to a spot to look down on the resort. A half dozen mercs were now standing out front and several more were tromping around the hillside.

“
Dang!
I was afraid of that,” he muttered.

Veyron looked, too. “Reavers. What about your refractive armor?”

“Trust me. I used to be one of them. We’re not getting in that way.”

“What are you going to do? You can’t just give up!”

“I didn’t say I was giving up,” Hector snapped, then felt bad. Sabrah believed him and was willing to help. She’d even been willing to use her credit card to keep Izaak in the game. “Sorry. There are always alternatives. I need to talk to Alkindi.”

Ch. 25

“A mass driver,” said Alkindi, dwarfed by the size of V-2 as he stood beside the machine.

“You mean like a MAC gun?” Izaak replied. “A magnetic accelerator cannon?”

“You’ve heard of it?” Alkindi seemed surprised.

“HALO,” said Izaak. “I read all the books.”

“Look where it’s pointed,” Alkindi said. Izaak sighted along the bore, looking straight toward the peninsula. “We can bombard the inner citadel from here. It should only take a few salvos to reduce the walls.” Alkindi pointed to a pile of engines nearby. “Ammo.”

“Pretty cool, huh?” said Darxhan, returning from a junk collecting mission with a barrel full of fusion cells. “But it’s going to be real power hungry. Drains ten fusion cells with each shot.”

“So how do you build this stuff,” said Izaak, awestruck.

“Math.”

“Math?” Izaak questioned. “Your secret is math?”

“
Omega Wars
has a very sophisticated physics engine,” said Alkindi. “Second-order, real-world physics.”

“Second what?” Izaak and Veyron said together.

“Real physics, but simpler. If you want to build something more complicated than a sword you have to design using actual engineering principles.”

“You didn’t learn that in school,” said Veyron. “At least, not the school I go to. Whenever I ask Mrs. Reynolds what I’m going to use the math for, she just says, ‘You’ll use it everyday.’’’

“I know, I hate that,” Alkindi laughed. “My dad’s an engineer. But he doesn’t do that anymore. He helps me figure out the physics and math so we can make a good design.”

“Well, you’re going to have to show me some time,” said Hector, thinking about his own father. “Because I’m not convinced math is good for anything yet. I’m going to have to see it.”

Alkindi whipped out a pad and started to write down symbols and equations, right there in the virtual world.

“Not now,” Izaak laughed, and then wondered how Alkindi could write on something in the game. This was not the time to ask. “Right now, I need to get on top of that resort.”

“Resort?” Darxhan and Alkindi said in unison.

“The hotel up on the peninsula.”

“Why?” Darxhan and Alkindi said in unison again.

“What are you guys, joined at the brain? Because there are Reavers guarding it.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any Reavers up there,” said Darxhan.

“Well, there are now. And I got to get inside.”

“And you’re not going to tell us why,” said Darxhan. “Are you?”

“The slipgate’s up there. And some other cool stuff. Until then, just stay away from those Reavers. We can’t have any of you guys getting killed.”

“Oh, this is about that crazy theory,” said Darxhan, doubtfully.

“What theory?” Alkindi asked excitedly.

“Can we just drop this!” exclaimed Izaak. “Deion, just shut up? You got me into a butt-load of trouble at the funeral.” Part of him wanted to pull out his arc sword and drive it straight into Darxhan’s chest.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

“Look, I’ll tell you everything when it’s all over. Until then, don’t get killed. Promise me.”

“Okay, okay,” said Darxhan. “Jeeze, you don’t have to get all weepy about it. I promise I won’t get killed by Reavers or those other dudes.”

“Good,” said Izaak.

“Now, show me where you need to go,” said Alkindi, and they marched together to the top of the hill and stared across the water toward the towering peninsula. Alkindi stood looking for a long time.

“Can you do it?” Izaak finally asked.

Alkindi nodded slowly. “Of course. With the quadratic equation …”

“The quadratic equation?”

“For gravity.” He paused. “And figure out a way to get you out after you’ve gotten in.” He stopped talking and stared a while longer, then said suddenly, “It will take a few days to get everything together. And I’m still working on my garage.”

“We’ve got less than a week.” What had happened to the time? Hector suddenly wondered.

“What’s the hurry?” asked Alkindi.

“I just need to get it done.” Less than a week. Would there be enough time?

“Well, it won’t take that long,” Alkindi assured him.

Izaak looked up at the side of the mass driver. “Why do you call it V-2?”

“Your sniper rifle, wasn’t it Vera? This is the world’s biggest sniper rifle: Vera-2.”

But Hector hadn’t told Alkindi about Vera… God, Deion had a big mouth.

Ch. 26

The summit of world leaders began in Alanya in four days. Two weeks had magically turned into four days seemingly over night.
Four days!
Hector didn’t even know if Alkindi had found a way into the resort hotel because he wasn’t allowed to play
Omega Wars
. And none of his friends were playing because they were all working on their history reports. As he walked into class, Hector wondered if he’d be able to talk about Alanya at all or if he’d just babble incoherently and have a heart attack in front of everyone.

Hector heard little of his classmates’ presentation. He worried about his own, instead. Worried about the summit. Worried about the Reavers finding their base and killing them all. And when it was finally his turn, he spent most of his time showing photographs he had taken while in Alanya. It wasn’t his best work. He delved briefly into the see-saw history of the area and presented his grandfather’s findings. And he gave an overview of the President’s visit, but he predicted failure of the summit, saying most of the people in that part of the world were not at all interested in peace. When he sat down, he knew he’d done a crappy job.

Sanjar, with the last name of Zahedi, went right after him, the last report. He went to the front of the class, inserted a flash-drive into the computer, and began his slide show.

“When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476,” he began, “Europe descended into anarchy.” What followed, he went on to explain, was known in the West as the ‘Dark Ages’. But the knowledge of Rome didn’t die everywhere, for even as the once vast empire fell into ruin, a new power was rising.

At the center of this new power, he went on, was the city of Baghdad, where wise men from all over the world came to study, and learn, and share ideas. Baghdad, under the Islamic caliphs not only kept the flame of knowledge burning, but added to it. And were it not for these scientists, Sanjar claimed, the European Renaissance could not have happened, nor the industrial revolution.

Hector tried to ignore the presentation but it was the best of the day with lots of colorful pictures and graphics and even animation. Sanjar clearly knew the material and delivered it with a passion none of the other students could match.

Mathematics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Physics, Medicine, Law, Ethics, Literature, Philosophy, Sanjar continued with his well-practiced delivery, had all flourished under Islamic caliphs who respected knowledge and learning every bit as much as treasure.
Algebra
, the basis of modern mathematics, he told them, was an Arabic word. The very symbols used by the West, and the rules for using them, came from Arabia and even today were called
Arabic
numerals. The modern world, he pointed out, could not exist built upon Roman numerals and their clunky arithmetic. Certainly not computers.

“And there is no reason,” Sanjar went on to say, “that Avicenna, Abu al-Qasim, al-Khwarzimi, Ishaq al-Kindi, and others, aren’t held in the same esteem as Isaac Newton, Nicholas Copernicus, and Galileo. Only the bias of western scholars prevents it.”

Bias? Hector scoffed. If anyone was biased it was Sanjar! If these men had been so important, he was sure he would have heard of them. But Sanjar just kept going, launching into his “Very favorite!” Ya’qūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī. What kind of name was that? Hector wondered. He was born in 801 AD in southern Iraq. Known simply as ‘The Arab Philosopher,’ he made important contributions to virtually every field of science and philosophy, including the invention of algebra. The Arabic word
al-jabr
, which later became
algebra
, was one of his methods for solving a quadratic equation. “Were it not for al-Kindi,” Sanjar claimed, “there would have been no Renaissance. No Industrial Revolution. And no iPods.”

And were it not for Muslims, Hector said to himself, there’d be no terrorists, no 9/11, no IEDs, and his father would still be alive.

“The very myth of the magical wizard,” Sanjar continued, as Hector rolled his eyes, “the Medieval sorcerer, comes from these men. The pointed hat and the robes aren’t European. And the wand –” He produced a long, sharp stick and motioned as he spoke. “A stick used to stir concoctions. A sharp tool to probe a dissection. A stylus to write in the sand.” He stuck it into the candle, let it char, and then drew a line on a piece of paper. “Even a pencil. The wand was to the Muslim scholar what the computer is to the scientist today.”

The snotty Persian stood in front of the class, now adorned with a pointed hat and waiving his wand, looking like some reject from a Harry Potter fan-movie. “Knights returning to Europe after the crusades brought stories of these learned men – their strange spells and incantations, their wondrous technology – home with them. And we all know how soldiers tell stories! Especially soldiers that had lost and were looking for excuses.”

Hector clenched his teeth in anger. Soldiers did their duty. They didn’t make excuses. Sanjar was attacking Hector’s father.
On purpose!
He glanced at the teacher who had an insipid smile on his face, as if Sanjar had said nothing worse that blue jays are blue. Hector bit his lip, fighting the urge to leap from his seat and shut Sanjar’s mouth permanently.

Still, Sanjar continued, masterfully masking his attack on Hector as fact. “They became magical, in league with the Devil, able to cast spells. But their spells were nothing more than math, engineering, and basic chemistry. al-Kindi wasn’t a wizard at all. He was an engineer. A scientist.”